# Anthropic Cyber Verification Program: tiered access for defenders

> Anthropic now gates Claude's offensive-security help behind three verified access tiers.

- **Severity:** Info: Research, tools, evals or lab claims with no direct exposure. Context, not an alert.
- **Category:** Lab safety
- **Published by:** Anthropic
- **Disclosed:** 2026-10-06
- **Affects:** Claude
- **Research by:** Anthropic
- **Primary source:** https://www.anthropic.com/news/cyber-verification-program
- **Page:** https://theinjection.dev/items/anthropic-cyber-verification-program-tiers/

Anthropic is expanding its Cyber Verification Program into Defense, Red Team and Specialized tiers that relax Claude's cyber safeguards for verified security teams. Anthropic says its public models block most cyber work.

## What happened

Anthropic announced on October 6, 2026 that it is expanding its Cyber Verification Program into three tiers of verified access. Defense covers security teams, critical-infrastructure operators, open-source maintainers and individual researchers with a record of reporting vulnerabilities. Red Team covers organizations doing authorized adversarial testing, and Specialized covers safety-critical work reviewed with the US government.

## How it works

Anthropic says its generally available models block most cyber work. At the Defense tier, 46 of 50 of its test tasks are still blocked. At the Red Team tier, Anthropic says there are no blocks on its multi-stage cyber operations eval, and individuals are not eligible for that tier.

## Who is affected

Security teams that use Claude for vulnerability research or red teaming and currently hit refusals.

## What to do

Security teams that hit cyber refusals in Claude can review the eligibility rules for each tier and apply through Anthropic's program page.

## Sources

1. [Anthropic Announcement](https://www.anthropic.com/news/cyber-verification-program)
2. [CVP Help Article](https://support.claude.com/en/articles/14604842-cyber-verification-program)